ature pass. The
photoplay can flit from one to the other. Not more than one sixteenth of
a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the
other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene. The whole keyboard
of the imagination may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature.

There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads it.
There is no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with the
male handwriting and the words of love and the request for her hand. We
see it in her radiant visage, we read it from her fascinated arms and
hands; and yet how much more can the photoartist tell us about the storm
of emotions in her soul. The walls of her little room fade away.
Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom around her, rose bushes in
wonderful glory arise and the whole ground is alive with exotic flowers.
Or the young artist sits in his attic playing his violin; we see the bow
moving over the strings but the dreamy face of the player does not
change with his music. Under the spell of his tones his features are
immovable as if they were staring at a vision. They do not speak of the
changing emotions which his melodies awake. We cannot hear those tones.
And yet we do hear them: a lovely spring landscape widens behind his
head, we see the valleys of May and the bubbling brooks and the young
wild beeches. And slowly it changes into the sadness of the autumn, the
sere leaves are falling around the player, heavy clouds hang low over
his head. Suddenly at a sharp accent of his bow the storm breaks, we are
carried to the wildness of rugged rocks or to the raging sea; and again
comes tranquillity over the world, the little country village of his
youth fills the background, the harvest is brought from the fields, the
sun sets upon a scene of happiness, and while the bow slowly sinks, the
walls and ceiling of his attic close in again. No shade, no tint, no hue
of his emotions has escaped us; we followed them as if we had heard the
rejoicing and the sadness, the storm and the peace of his melodious
tones. Such imaginative settings can be only the extreme; they would not
be fit for the routine play. But, however much weaker and fainter the
echo of the surroundings may be in the realistic pictures of the
standard photoplay, the chances are abundant everywhere and no skillful
playwright will ever disregard them entirely. Not the portrait of the
man but the picture as a whole has to be filled wi